- David Ansel: Austin's Soup Peddler
A Rockzillaworld Feature
- By Bonny Holder
 Mary Konkel, my
maternal grandmother, lived in a first-floor "Polish flat"
on Milwaukee's south side. I guess it was really a slum, but
even as a kid, I loved funky old things. There was speckled linoleum
on the kitchen floor, two refrigerators side-by-side (one containing
someone's old molar in the egg rack!), a spooky old pantry, and
a tiny little bedroom just off the kitchen containing my spooky
old grandpa.. The small sashed window faced south, and in bitter
cold winter, the sun poured in through the organza curtains,
across the top of the pedal sewing machine, landing on the oilcloth-covered
table, and my lunch. Which, in winter time, was homemade
soup.
All my life, I've been charmed with soup. My earliest memories
include gazing down at one of Granny's old-fashioned, wide-brimmed
china soup bowls, fascinated with the little pools of chicken
fat gleaming on the surface of the golden liquid, little flakes
of parsley suspended alongside the egg noodles and thin carrot
suns.
At home, Mom served Campbell's, in her moderne maroon Melmac
bowls. And that was good, too. I was a picky eater, but never
around soup. Sometime she cooked Mrs. Grass's chicken soup, with
the strange yellow "egg" of fat and flavor that came
in the box, exploding in the boiling water into a chartreusy
haze.
I've maintained a healthy interest in soup for over half a
century. I once burned my arm, badly, with hot chicken stock,
but I forgave it. I've made dozens of tureens of hot soups, cold
soups, chowders and stews. Nothing I make my own self pleases
me as much as soup. And, because I follow my heart, I wanted
to meet David Ansel, the Soup Peddler of Austin, Texas, as soon
as I could. In a way, he is living my soup dream.
David Ansel rocks. Now in his third year as Austin's Soup
Peddler -- he delivers his product on a bicycle -- he has turned
a brilliant idea into a thriving business; bicycle-delivered
made-from-scratch soup.
 I dropped in on him
at his new, squeaky-clean preparation kitchen at the corner of
1st and Mary Street, in my favorite city. We talked and shot
pictures, but agreed to conduct our interview via the modern
miracle of e-mail. Being an educated and articulate fella, Ansel
writes with more formality than he speaks. In person, he's a
little reserved, and a lot casual. I don't think he would say
"was first seeded when I came to Austin" in a conversation.
But I liked his actual wording so much in these e-mails, I want
to show you how he wrote it.
"My rebellion phase, if this is it, was first seeded
when I came to Austin," writes the lithe and handsome
young soup monger. "I observed the societal alternatives
that are available to folks here, and was inspired by it."
His flash of inspiration followed a trip to Africa a few years
ago. "That's when I realized I had waaay too much security
in my life, and that I was not tethered to money and normalcy
the way I thought I was," he recalls. "I
also felt cradled by my community when I returned to Austin.
That's when I started the business...when I felt like there was
no reason not to experiment with life."
The experiment is a grand one, in the traditional style of
Keeping Austin Weird. And to what does he owe his healthy attitude
towards food, exercise and greenocity? I'm pretty sure he smiled
when he answered that one. "Common sense," he
types.
Exactly how does bicycle-delivered homemade soup service work?
This is off Ansel's very entertaining website, at www.souppeddler.com.
The minimum order is two quarts, which costs $15, tax and
tip included. "Compare that to a delivered pizza. Healthy,
handmade, delicious, filling, and doesn't leave you with that
solid-block-o-cheese feeling in the belly," writes Ansel
"Two quarts of soup is a lot of soup. If you're really
into the soup, you might not want to share it with anyone. Otherwise,
you should probably share it. That's the point of soup. Start
a weekly soup night at your house. Have your friends bring wine,
bread, and salad. Hang out. Have a good time. Gather around food,
as in days of yore."
Each week, subscribers receive an e-mailed soup announcement
describing the following week's soup. Right now, Ansel is providing
a choice of two soups a week, one very vegetarian, the other
not necessarily so.
He continues with these directions:
"On your weekly Soup Day, here's what you do. You put
a cooler on your porch. You put your previous week's empty soup
bucket (gently cleaned) in your cooler. You leave your payment
in the container. You throw some ice in the cooler. When you
come home, the empty container is gone. The soup is there instead.
If you work in an office and someone's always there, you won't
need to bother with the cooler. and associated services. If you
don't return your empty container, a $5 debit will be added to
your account... and will be subtracted when you eventually return
it to me. If you forget to pay one week, you pay the next. You
can pre-pay by the month, whatever you want... you have an ongoing
account with me. I'm not worried about the money so much; I know
where you live."
The site includes a page of safe bicycling tips. "When
I first started, I didn't have a trailer, so I just strapped
a cooler precariously on top of the milk crate on the back of
my bike," he writes. "The bike constantly fell over,
the soups would pop open en route. But then I instituted the
Rubber Band Policy, wherein I rubber band the containers to help
them stay shut as they're shocked and jolted during the trip."
There's a lot of topographic sort of thought that goes into the
delivery routes, Ansel notes, to minimize the effort and make
sure that he's only tackling the big hills later in the route,
when the cooler is relatively empty.
So David Ansel is Austin's equivalent of a ecologically-sensitive
milkman or pizza guy. But why soup? His answer, like all
his answers, is thoughtful: "I used to like making soup
because I could make it all at once and serve myself and roommates
for the entire week," he writes. "There was the meditative
aspect of making soup, slowness and quiet... there was the alchemical
aspect, where ingredients magically transform themselves over
time... and then there's... shelf life. I unwittingly chose for
my business the foodstuff with the longest shelf life, which
has helped me considerably in logistics.
"Also, soup is form-fitting. It fits perfectly into the
reusable containers that I wanted to use for the business. Of
course it does. It's liquid. But other foods wouldn't fit. Plus
there's a variety of soup metaphors which I could lay on you...
basically the societal melting pot motif. Plus there's the whole
aboriginal thing... soup is an ancient food and I'm sure we have
a collective unconscious attachment to it. Bowls were invented
before plates, spoons before forks, pots before pans, etc.
"If you buy into mystical shit, years ago I met a man
on a street corner in Washington, DC, who told me I would one
day be the spoon that stirs the alphabet soup of this land."
Ansel is becoming known far outside his south Austin home.
On October 22, 2003, the Christian Science Monitor ran a lengthy
story about him and his business, and they describe him this
way: "He's a riches-to-rags guy who quit his computer programming
job to make homemade soup and deliver it by bicycle to his neighbors."
His timetable varies depending on the soup. Now that he's
in his own bright-orange soup shop (instead of borrowing a local
restaurant on its closed day), things will be easier than they
had been. "Actually cooking the soup generally doesn't
take longer than an hour, but prepping all the vegetables can
take up to five," he tells me. "It's sort of
like painting a room... most of the time is spent preparing the
wall, masking off the trim, setting the drop cloths, etc. Then
painting the room doesn't really take too long."
Soup packaging takes time, plus washing out all the reusable
containers. "All the database, website, business, accounting,
and recipe development adds quite a bit of time to the average
day," admits Ansel. Delivery day? Depends on the neighborhood.
"A delivery route takes between two and three hours. Biking
over to the neighborhood may take ten or fifteen minutes, but
once I'm there, the delivery stops are pretty close together.
Lots of the time involves just hopping on and off the bike, going
up to the porch, collecting the empty containers and payment.
"Shmoozing with the customers and their neighbors is
part of the job, part of the community aspect of the business.
It's pretty exhausting overall, but in the grand scheme of jobs,
it's very fun and rewarding."
Is Mama proud? "Yes, she's kvelling," he grins through
the computer. "They're very proud and supportive. They were
dubious at the beginning, but after seeing the response I've
gotten from my community and the media, they're big believers
now."
David Ansel loves traveling anywhere where there is a street
food culture. He would like to spend more time in Mexico.
"Street food is what inspired me, in a sense, to start
this business," he says.
And his destination as far as cooking direction? "I'm
going to get into non-vegetarian soups, at least use bones and
carcasses for meat stocks. I figure it's the next best thing
to animal recycling. I've been cutting myself and my customers
off from a lot of the world's soup traditions by staying purely
vegetarian." As usual, he's thought this out. "I'll
try to do this in as sustainable a manner as possible."
Right now, he is serving 150 Austin residents soup each week
but he plans to add an additional 100 or so customers off the
waiting list as soon as he gets used to his new plant.
Are there adventures to be had in cooking soup? Of course!
"I'd say that kaffir lime leaves were the hardest to
obtain," he remembers. There's a chapter about this in his
upcoming book, proposal already submitted. "Pomegranate
syrup is a relatively exotic soup flavor that I used in an Iraqi
soup. Hard pear cider and dried mango powder go in this week's
pumpkin soup. For the gumbo last year, I used lobster bodies
for the stock... that's probably the most impressive sight that
I've seen... as the stock was cooking, their little lobster faces
would surface and then dive in the pot."
Ew. But Ansel takes the bad with the good. "There was
the Italian white bean soup that went BAD right before I moved
the operation out of my home kitchen. That was depressing...
I had to bury my dead soup child in the compost pile." But
he's had no delivery disasters, "aside from the occasional
spill here and there."
And the good? "Miracles and serendipities would probably
be too numerous to count," he writes mysteriously, and
in my mind I can see him turning back to the stockpot, humming
to himself, as he gets back to his work.
David Ansel's website is:
www.souppeddler.com
You can contact Bonny Holder at bonny-at-rockzilla.net
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